Novocaine
by The Last European
Summary: They say home is where the heart is. Jubilation Lee can’t help but wonder when all of the heart went out of the mansion.
1. The Irresistible Orbit

AN and warnings: Novocaine is a series of loosely linked short stories. It's not necessary to read them in order, or read one to understand the others. As for the warnings, they deal with a disturbing subject matter and are not for the faint of heart. There is sex, though it is not particularly graphic, and mention of violence and abuse. Canonically, they make mention of Uncanny X-Men #423 and Operation: Zero Tolerance. They're also Wolverine/Jubilee. If that makes you feel dirty, you'll want to skip them.

* * *

When one has had a particularly nasty series of misfortunes, one tends to receive a lot of well-intentioned advice. Once, while shoving her into a new foster placement, a social worker had told Jubilee that home was where her heart was. She had thought the pronouncement to be particularly cruel. Most of the time, she had felt as though her heart had been ripped from her chest and burned to greasy char with her parents in the wreckage of their car off of Mulholland Drive. She still thought about that woman. How her shitty, little car had reeked of stale cigarettes and old fast food. How she had patted Jubilee on the head and said it was too bad that they couldn't find her a Japanese family. She hadn't bothered correcting the woman. It was then that she had decided that, in the whole world, there wasn't a place that could feel like home or a person who could understand her.

After Australia, though, everything changed. And, for a while, she had been astounded by how happy and safe she felt. There were days when she had thought she might explode from the joy of being alive and loved and wanted. She didn't have those days anymore. Now, she thought about that social worker more and more frequently. _Home is where the heart is_, the woman had said. _Home is where the heart is._ Jubilee couldn't help but wonder when all of the heart had gone out of the mansion.

The halls were filled with shadowy ghosts, just before three o'clock in the morning, though the sconces that lined the walls fought bravely to chase them away. Jubilee crept on silent sock feet, her boots in hand, ready to be laced once stealth was no longer a consideration. Her body bowed under the weight of the over-stuffed bag she carried and with the determination that comes from having a final destination in mind. She hated the early morning hours, when any pretense at warmth had gone, leaving only the oozing chill of death and doom and betrayal.

She went to him, masked in the murmuring shadows of the mansion by night, an apparition at his bedside. He knew it was her before the door opened, even before he was awake. She never fully disturbed his slumber when she crept into his room at night - a feat only she could claim. Anyone else would have ended up with a throat full of adamantium. But she could slip into his bed without triggering his internal alarms. It was only her hot hands on his bare chest and cinnamon toothpaste breath on his lips that coaxed his body awake.

That night, she wasn't there for him. Not in the way he was used to. Not in the way he wanted her. She stood over his bed in street clothes, her bag hanging heavily from her shoulder.

"I'm leaving," she whispered. She was nervous; her body gravitated toward the door as though she was already making an exit. "I'm leaving a note for...I don't even know who. Everyone. No one. Paige, I guess. It doesn't matter anyway."

She sighed. The heavy bag pulled her thin shoulder down, making her look slumped. Defeated. She licked her lips and avoided looking at his prone figure.

"I just...I wanted to let you know that I'm going. That's all." She started moving before she finished speaking, desperate, it seemed, to get away. He reached out, his hand moving without his brain consciously telling it to, and grabbed her wrist as she turned. For a moment, they were silent and still. She leaned away while he grounded her to him.

"Darlin'," he breathed the endearment more than said it. He heard her short, hitching breaths.

"Wolvie," she said. Her voice was plaintive, pleading, almost whining. He heard her swallow.

"Jubilation," he said, his voice rasping and low.

He was a siren, calling her to the rocks; she couldn't ignore his song. He heard her bag drop heavily to the floor, signaling his victory. When she turned, finally, her face and form were illuminated by the grounds lights that streamed in through the window. She looked like a small child – thin and petulant. He drew her to him, as he always had. She acquiesced, as she always would.

He had been her everything for as long as she had known him, but it was only in his bed that his world shrank down to her size. How she smelled like salt sweat and chewing gum, like little girl and woman. How her body danced against his with an exceptional grace. How she breathed and moaned, gasped and sighed. Armageddon couldn't drag his focus away when she wrapped her body around him. With her, he didn't rage, didn't hurt, didn't think. With her, he simply was. She was dangerous. She was a drug, his drug - the only drug that worked for him.

Afterward, she lay on the broad expanse of his chest, her sweat-damp hair itching her neck and back. He pulled it away from her face, wrapping it idly around his fingers.

"I'm still going," she said. With her fingertips, she traced circles and squares through the hair on his chest. He watched her lips while she spoke. They were swollen, enflamed from his rough kisses.

"I know," he replied. Her hair was long now, so much longer than it had been the first time he had kissed her.

"And you're going to let me go?" She asked, raising her head to look at him. Her distrust was evident.

"Nah." He said it casually and watched the contours of her face change with the clenching of her jaw.

"You can't stop me."

"You know that ain't true," he murmured.

With his rough, worn hand still tangled in her hair, he cupped the back of her neck and pulled her back down to him. He drew too hard, overestimating the strength of her resolve; she whimpered when her lips hit his teeth. He wasn't sure what was more thrilling – that sound or the taste of her blood on his tongue. Her resistance had been cursory. Once engaged, she returned the kiss with a voracity that matched his own until, breathless, she broke away. He let her withdraw from him, went so as to untangle his hand from her hair. He gave her every opportunity to run; she didn't disappoint him by actually doing it.

She lay upon him, her whip-like spine cambered like the Sphinx. He moved his hands down the tensed muscles of her back, finally resting on her hips. Her hands caressed his shoulders while she layered kiss after kiss on his collarbones, over his chest, all the while whispering, "please". Over and over, she made her appeal to him. He tightened his grip.

"Please," she whispered. "Don't make me beg."

He was fairly certain there must have been a point in their history when he had said those same words to her. When he didn't respond, she said his name – awkwardly, he noted. He couldn't remember the last time she had called him by anything other than one of the million little nicknames she had christened him with.

"I ain't letting you go," he said forcefully, each word a harpoon tethering her to him. "I'm going with you."

Her face darkened momentarily before smoothing into a visage of absolute neutrality. Jubilee had a different mask for every occasion, each one a seamless representation of what she assumed was expected of her - the mischievous smile of a prankster; the laughing ebullience of a child; the sullen scowl of a teenager; the tough glare of a warrior; the glowing features of a lover. They were perfect, glossy simulacrums.

"Can I put my clothes on now, please?" Her voice was even and cold, and, with little inflection, a near-perfect mimic of Emma Frost.

He released her instantly, recoiling. She rolled her eyes and pushed herself roughly off of him. He watched her search for her garments.

When he asked her where they were going, she turned her back to him. While she ignored him, he watched her. She slid her panties on and twisted her arms behind to fasten her brassiere; he took inventory of her body. Her back was a roadmap of scars and clearly defined ribs. He frowned at the white lines, the darker shadows, the way her elbows and wrists knobbed. He hadn't noticed before that her hips were jagged edges. That she had small starbursts of puckered pink skin on her palms. He wondered that Warren's healing blood had raised her from the dead, but it hadn't erased the scars.

She turned finally when she heard whine of the hinges on his closet door.

"I think you're kind of missing the point of the whole unceremonious dumping thing," she said, her voice unnaturally high-pitched. "I should've just left you a note. 'Dear Wolvie, Stick with Chuck. He's a hell of a guy. If you're a really useful boy, maybe he won't ship you off to boarding school. Love always, Jubilee.' That would have made this lots easier. I can see why you like it so much, now."

She was nasty when cornered; her vicious little tongue betrayed her fear.

"Keep your voice down. You wanna have to come with an explanation as to why you're standing in my room in your underwear?"

Logan watched the mask wither as her face contorted into a sneer. She shook her shirt, clenched in her fist, at him.

"Yeah, because, obviously, it would be up to me to explain."

She struggled with her tee-shirt, the long sleeves bunching into themselves. Her jeans lay on the floor at his feet. He picked them up. They seemed impossibly tiny in his hands.

"How about this: I came in here and threw myself at you," Jubilee ranted, pauses punctuated with violent gesticulations. "Confessed my undying love. You, being Wolverine, the noble savage, the honor-bound samurai, turned me away because you couldn't feel that way for the little girl you had raised as your own daughter. Is that a more socially acceptable piece of revisionist history? Yeah? Well, let's get 'em in here so I can get the hell out."

She tried to comb the snarls out of her still damp hair with her fingers, glaring at him for his culpability in the mess. Noticing that he still held her jeans, she held her hand out for them, wiggling her fingers impatiently at him. He grinned, savagely playful, and shook the denim at her. In response, her scowl deepened. She strode the distance to him and snatched the jeans away from him. Logan sighed and sat on the edge of the bed in jeans, bare-chested and bare-footed. She pulled her pants on - first one leg and then, shakily, the other. She was unstable, her balance unusually off kilter. He had to restrain himself from steadying her.

"Godammit," she hissed at him. "You pulled the fucking button off.

She fiercely kicked the jeans off and hurled them at his face. He caught them and threw them back at her.

"Hey, take it easy, kid," he said lightly.

He was surprised when her face contorted. She snarled, her teeth flashing, gleaming like knives in the low light. He recognized himself in the ugliness of the expression. Her rage was his eidetic image. Logan wondered if the twist in his gut was what others felt around him.

"You always do that."

When he asked her what it was that he always did, his voice was hushed. She looked up at him in amazement.

"You call me 'kid'." She spat the word out. "You fuck me and then you call me 'kid'. Christ, Wolvie, don't you think that says something about you? Psychologically, I mean?" She foraged in her bag until she found a pair of green cargo pants.

"You're angry," he said, watching her struggle with her garments again.

"Duh," Jubilee seethed, fumbling with her clothing. "I'm always angry. Right now I'm so beyond mad at myself because I'm actually glad you want to come with me. I have to get the hell out of here and I'm relieved that you want to come along and hold my little hand out in the big, bad, scary world. I'm so unbelievably pathetic."

Hissing through her teeth, she struggled to button the fly of her pants, her fingers clumsily failing.

"God, these things are impossible," she finally exclaimed, kicking so that the wide leg of the cargos flapped angrily.

Logan watched her struggle. He watched her fail. And then he pulled her to him by her belt loops, gently brushed her hands away and buttoned neatly what she had toiled over.

When a hot drop of water hit his arm, he was confused for the instant it took to pick up the scent of her tears. He hadn't seen her cry in years. Motiveless for the first time in as long, he pulled her down into his arms. She crumpled. Fragmented. Broke apart as she had been secretly, dangerously threatening to since the first nail had been driven into her palm. Unable to support her own weight, she collapsed against him. Gathering her to him, he let her sob into his neck until she choked and gasped quiet. He stroked her hair, her neck, her back. He lifted her chin and kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips. He tasted her tears. He whispered to her that everything was going to be alright.

She raised her lids and looked at him.

"I don't think so," she whispered back. "I don't think anything will ever be right again."

In the phosphorescence of her wide and watery eyes, he saw a reflection of himself in blue.

And what he saw wasn't very nice.


	2. Tiny Fires

_Tiny Fires_

This motel room is a creaking, cracking fossil of floral curtains and scratchy bedding and middling cleanliness with furniture that chips and flakes and peels into rough edges that will cut your hands and scrape your shins if you're not careful. On the walls, paper yellowing like an ancient tome holds in confidence the secrets it has seen, threatening to turn to dust if touched even lightly. The carpeting is old and cheap and rough beneath bare feet with dirt and stains hidden in spotty swirls of brown and orange and green. There are furtive whispers in this room, churning and fusing with heated accusations, screams of rage and love murmured over moans. There are a million different people, a million different lives, a million different lies in this room.

When he first opened the door--a dirty key into a lock easily broken--Logan's nose had twitched under the onslaught of the blood and the piss and the jizz of person upon person upon person, world without end, Amen. But it all fades, like everything fades, after a while and, rather than remaining nearly unbearable, becomes simply uncomfortable. He grows accustomed to the stink of the room, layering on top of the unfamiliar scents, more welcome ones. There is Jubilee. Leftover pizza. There's the open beer on the bedside table next to him. There is the night wind blowing in through the open window, ruffling Jubilee's ponytail, cooling the stuffy room and bringing only the safe smells and sounds of the interstate and the New Mexico desert dark.

Logan is stretched out on the bed, rubber-limbed and easy, in just clean jeans. His hat rests on the stained and peeling dresser. Below that, his kicked-off boots and sweaty, dirty clothes are in a heap on the floor. Jubilee had herded him into the shower the moment they arrived, saying that the motel room already smelled like feet, so it didn't need to smell like his armpits, too. She's a pushy kid. Always insistent. Always acting like she knows what's best. He wanted to drag her in with him, wanted to listen to her squeal when the water was too cold. He wanted to watch the grime washing away from her skin and smell the road-smells as they faded from her hair.

Instead, he stepped into the shower by himself, not caring that the water was inexplicably scalding. Jubilee shut the door behind him.

By the time he was done, she was ordering pizza -- two of them, because he likes ground beef and she requires extra cheese and pineapple. She eats two pieces and declares herself stuffed, like she always does. Later on, he'll eat the rest of it (just because it's there) and marvel at how she can turn anything into junk food unfit for normal consumption.

Jubilee is lying on her stomach, her head at the foot of the bed, watching a _Law & Order_ rerun. Logan is lying on his back, his eyes shut, trying to ignore the _Law & Order_ rerun. His hands, though they rest on his chest, twitch to touch her skin. He wants to feel the warmth of her legs beneath them. He wants to listen to her laugh when he brushes the delicate, ticklish spots on her inner thighs. He presses his palms into his chest to still them. To keep them from betraying him.

He's just starting to doze off when he feels something poke into his side. He ignores it and is poked again. And again. He opens one eye, just a little bit. The poking thing is a toe. Jubilee has rolled over onto her side, the offending foot still hovering near him.

"Quit," he growls at her.

"I'm thirsty," she says and toes him again.

"Have a beer."

She gasps, her mouth falling open in mock outrage. "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor! I'm afraid that's twenty-five to life, Wolvie."

He just grunts in reply.

"Get me something out of the vending machine."

"Get it yourself." He shuts the eye again.

She squeals a high-pitched whine that makes him cringe. "But I'm too lazy."

"Looks like you're just gonna have to suffer," Logan says.

"Mean."

She throws the remote at him. It's old and bulky and it hits him hard in the chest. He feels the bed shift as she wiggles off of it. He hears the slap of her flip-flops and the door as it opens and shuts. He turns the television off and sighs. In the blessed quiet, Logan snoozes.

Until the quiet wakes him up.

The quiet wakes him because the quiet means that Jubilee hasn't returned yet. How long has she been gone? He isn't sure. Her scent in the room is fading.

He goes out looking for her.

He finds her in front of the vending machine, a bottle of water in hand. He also finds a tow-headed kid in too-big jeans and a too-tight tee-shirt chatting her up. Logan thinks of six ways to eviscerate the boy from ten paces, so he stops at fifteen–-a distance safe enough to trust himself. The kid is older than Jubilee--nineteen, maybe, and good-looking in that vacant, surf-rat way. By the way she's smiling at him, Jubilee obviously thinks so.

Blending into the shadows, Logan watches them. He wonders what she looks like to this kid. In black terrycloth shorts, a pink stretch tank top and flip-flops, he thinks she must look like any other pretty teenager. In the motel's dirty orange lights, the kid can't see her scars--where the nails drove through, where the battles left her beaten, where madmen plied her with pain and deceit. In the pale light of the normal New Mexico night, the kid can't see her as she really is.

He _is_ just a kid, after all.

But he smells like man. Smells like a young buck, all haunches and antlers and sharp ambition. The scent pushes against Logan like it wants to make him unsteady. Like it wants to challenge the old man. Call the old man out and fight him until he's dead or running. Here's your pink slip, old man. It's time to retire, old man. It's past your time, old man. It's time to give up what was yours.

The blades tremble beneath the skin. They want to pick up the gauntlet that the kid doesn't even know he has thrown. Logan won't be put to the hills just yet. Not by this one. Too weak. Too young. It's coming, though. Not this time. Not next time. But soon. Someday soon, he'll lose. He'll lose and she'll be gone.

"Yeah, so my buddy, Glen, was just like _road trip, man!_ and here we are," the kid is rambling.

Jubilee giggles and flips her ponytail. "Really? That's, like, so cool that you can just take off. I could never get away with that."

"Why not?" The kid is leaning closer to her. Too close. "You don't have a boyfriend or something do you?"

"Jubilation," Logan barks her name.

The kid flinches. He's startled. Jubilee just sighs. Her shoulders slump a little bit, like she's already conceded defeat in an argument she hasn't yet had. The kid looks at Logan standing in the shadows. He takes a step back from Jubilee. And then two more.

"Is that your dad? I didn't mean to get you in trouble." The kid is whispering. He doesn't know Logan can still hear him. Of course he doesn't know.

But Jubilee does.

"Don't worry about it," she whispers back, smiling. "My dad," she emphasizes the word, "is just totally over-protective, in an insane, mass-murderer kind of way."

The kid looks back to Logan, shadowed like a movie villain. Like the masher on the other end of the line. Like the slasher in the attic. Like the thing that goes bump in the night. Logan can smell his fear; it's blood in the water. The challenge is withdrawn and the buck retreats.

Not this one. Not now. Not tonight.

Jubilee watches the withdrawal with quirked eyebrow and a knowingly sardonic smile before sauntering casually over to Logan. He takes her roughly by the elbow and steers her back to the room, walking so quickly that she has to trot to keep up with him. When they get there, he nearly throws her in. She kicks her sandals off and puts the bed between them. He slams the door and is perversely pleased that it makes her jump. He wants it to frighten her. He wants her to feel guilty. He wants her to feel sorry.

She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him defiantly.

It pisses him off. Jubilee pisses him off. She yanks his chain and pushes his buttons. She works him like she's taking him on a long con. She plays him like he's a machine, an instrument, a tool, a toy. Like she knows him in and out and upside-down. Like she has confidence.

Logan is a little bit proud of her for that.

Across the bed, Jubilee's blowing smoke. He's mad at her? That's fucking rich. Well, she can be mad at him, too. She can play his game. She can play any game.

There's more to her than there used to be. She has filled out since they left the mansion in a way that is both gratifying and satisfying. She's not lush. Not curved. She's still angles and planes and edges. But she's not so transparent. Not stretched so thinly, like an overused rubber band, about to painfully snap.

Logan's eyes wander the curve of her breast, the jut of her hip, the flesh of her thighs before returning to her face. She smiles--a slight quiver of the lip that's gone so quickly he can't be sure it was ever there at all. He doesn't have time to wonder about it. Jubilee isn't smoking anymore. She's smoldering.

She knows this game. She knows the rules.

On the bed, on her knees, she's on her way toward him and he feels the pull. He feels it from his bare feet, straight up his knees, into his hips and up his spine. She is his. His. His. His. She belongs to him; he feels the pull to take her. Nearer and nearer, she moves and it pulls, until she's inches away from him and he's inches away from absorbing her.

She runs her fingers over his collarbone, up his neck, down his jaw. She feels his artery. How fast his pulse is. He lets her linger there, feeling his pumping blood. Her hands are hot; they ignite tiny fires on his skin that she fans the flames of with her lips, her teeth, her tongue. She burns; he blisters. Her hands move up and up and up, slowly, so slowly, arms winding around his neck as she pulls his body flush against hers. She smells like sweet-sticky pineapple and slippery-wet desire. The motel smells, the desert night, the usurping young buck--they're all pushed back and under and away. They're going, going, going and they're gone, gone, gone. All that's left is her, just her. Her heady scent surrounds him until he knows of nothing else.

"He thinks you're my father." Her voice is low and rough, her mouth close to his ear. "Do you want me to call you _Daddy_?"

She takes his lower lip in her teeth. She bites until it bleeds, bleeds for just a moment before healing over. And then she bites again. It's a game, too--her favorite one to play. Make him bleed. Watch him mend. Hurt him hard. Watch him heal.

She knows she can't make the hurt stick.

Logan loses himself in the smell of her and the sound of her and the taste of her and the hurt of her. He lets himself go until he's gone.

He is gone.

But she's still here.

She laughs when he growls and laughs when he picks her up. She stops laughing when he pushes her against the wall hard enough to hurt. As he tears her shorts and ruins her panties, she thinks about how easy he is to turn on, to manipulate. As he bruises her neck with his teeth, she wonders when she became manipulative. She wonders what made her this way. Little girls don't make themselves. Little girls are molded and shaped.

Jubilee has a checklist in her head.

Emma?

Check.

The White Queen knew better than anyone that allegiances are a liability. There's a sucker born every minute and hero-worship is the game for them. Emma branded her with the knowledge that adoration equals disappointment and tattooed _Trust No One_ over every last inch of Jubilee's body.

Logan's hands are rough, enflaming the delicate skin of her breasts.

Kurt?

Check.

Jubilee has nursed a secret distaste for the blue demon since the crucifixion. When she looks at him, she sees only the terror and the pain. She feels the muscles that tear. The tendons that rip. The bones that shatter. The screams that she knows are Angelo's that shred through her. The cold calm that slips over her as she dies. When she looks at Kurt, she remembers only these things. She remembers that dreams make even wise men foolish. And everyone suffers for the dream.

Logan's waist is hard and rippled. When she wraps her legs tightly around it, he growls so deeply that she can feel it in her knees.

Bastion?

Check.

The thought of Bastion makes her feel like her heart is shriveling under her ribs. Bastion changed her so thoroughly that she feels like a different person now, right down to her DNA and her fingerprints. At the Hulkbuster base, she learned that sometimes there is no restraint to cruelty and that infinite suffering is a very real possibility. She learned that she was less trustworthy than an intentional traitor. That she was less worthy than the untried and untrained. That she was nothing more than a nuisance and a burden. That she was never going to be a hero. That she couldn't even save herself, much less the world. That there was only one person who was ever going to rescue her.

Logan.

It is always going to be Logan. No matter how old or strong or powerful she becomes, it will always be him. She will never just be Jubilation Lee. She'll never just be a girl. A woman. Independent. On her own. Light skin. Blue eyes. Short legs. Wearing a suit. Wearing jeans. Too-expensive shoes. Not-expensive-enough perfume. Go to college. Go to classes. Go to parties. Meet guys. Meet girls. Have a job. Work at Starbucks. Work at Saks. Work at Ralph Lauren. Go out for drinks. Go out on dates. Fall in love. Get proposed to. Get engaged. Have a wedding. Have a baby. Grow up together. Grow old together. Die together.

That will never be her. That will never be _hers_. All she has ever had is this. All she will ever have is this. It is always going to be Logan. Never anything but Logan. She is never going to be able to save herself. She will never be able to let him go. She will never be free.

She wraps her arms around his neck and buries her face in his hair.

She thinks that she doesn't even know if she's alive anymore.

He bruises her thighs and buries himself inside of her.

He doesn't think at all.


	3. Don McLean's Greatest Hits

_Don McLean's Greatest Hits_

"That's a big fucking truck," she said. "Do your feet even reach the pedals?"

"Cute," he growled in reply to her joke.

"Naturally."

It was a 1979 Ford F250 with creeping rust camouflaged by dull red paint. There was baling twine keeping the tailgate in an upright position and duct tape holding the driver's side mirror in place; the other mirror had gone entirely and the chrome bumpers had long since had the shiny beaten out of them.

She examined the truck, frowning. "Dude, there's hay stuck to the tires. And, seriously, could you find a huger truck? It's going to totally eat gas, Blob-style. Like, how expensive is that going to be? Money doesn't grow on trees, mister. And how is the tailgate even staying up? Is that string? Are the shocks okay? Is it bouncy? I bet it's bouncy."

He interrupted her by growling, "So what if it's bouncy?"

"So what if it's bouncy?" she mimicked. "Bouncy equals dangerous. Bad things happen in bouncy trucks. It could rupture my spleen!" She paused indignantly when he snorted. "It could! Stuff like that happens! I saw a thing about it on TV."

He smirked. "I got to tell you, _Dukes of Hazzard_ ain't exactly a reliable source for information. This truck ain't gonna rupture your spleen."

She huffed out an indignant sigh. "You don't know for sure. And what about my wrist?"

She held up her left arm, enclosed in a cast from hand to elbow.

"What about your wrist?" He adjusted the his hat against the increasingly hot glare of the mid-morning sun.

"The bouncing," she said very slowly, drawing out the second word as though he might not understand otherwise. "It might hurt my wrist."

"Well, your wrist is just gonna have to suffer then," he said.

"You are not very nice to me." She glared at him, her lips in a sullen pout.

"What are you talking about?" he asked. "Not very nice to you? I just bought you a truck."

"Yeah, a big, jiggle truck."

She stood, toe to toe with him, sticking her chin up aggressively. Her eyes squinting in a close simulacrum of his own surly glare, she looked less threatening and more like a little girl playing dress-up with a hand-me-down fight face.

He crossed his arms over his chest. Her antics were custom-designed for his amusement. She liked the truck, he could tell. He had known she would the moment he had noticed it on the side of the road. It was just the sort of thing she'd go for. She didn't like pretty. She didn't like new. She liked old and worn, used and spare. Just gears, a radio and a dash to put her feet on.

Lucky for him.

"Where'd you get it?" she asked. He could smell her Big Red chewing gum.

"Farm up the road. Saw it when we were coming in." They had hitch-hiked a hundred miles the day before, after the alternator in the used Jeep they had picked up had given out. "Guy said it still run good."

She wrapped her fingers through his scraggly, overgrown sideburns and pulled his face down until their noses touched.

"I like the sticker," she whispered.

She cheerfully patted him on the cheeks and spun around, flashing him a high-beam smile over her shoulder as she ran back to their motel room. He watched her until she disappeared into the room and then walked around to the back of the truck, arms still folded.

There was an _Easy Does It_ bumper sticker on the sliding rear window. He almost laughed.

While he waited for her to come back, he checked over the truck again. It was a heaping hulk of metal. He wouldn't have put good money on how long it would last. It would get them further down the road, though, and that's all that mattered. He checked the tire pressure and then, wiping his hands on his already grimy tank top, put his faith in American mechanics and left well enough alone.

He turned just in time to watch her crash out of their room with her usual lack of stealth, staggering under the weight of their two bags. Leaning on one arm against the back of the truck, he watched her struggle with them.

"Sure, dude," she screamed at him, across the parking lot. "Don't worry about me. Wouldn't want you to strain yourself or anything. Just let the cripple carry the bags."

Her painfully bright pink tee was damp with sweat, her blue-black hair clinging to her face and neck, when she dropped the bags at his feet. He smirked at her and easily slung the luggage through the open passenger-side door.

"Show-off," she muttered.

When he turned around again, she was holding her arms out, bouncing lightly on the toes of her Chucks.

"Put me up, too," she said.

He grinned. "What? Too little to get in the big fuckin' truck by yourself?"

She snorted. "We're gonna have to fight over who gets to be the kettle in this scenario. Though, it's pretty obvious that you're the pot…."

"Hey, you reap what you sow, small-stuff."

"Put me up!"

"But then who'll put me up?" he asked her. "I'm short. You said so."

"I'm smaller! And younger! And a girl!"

"You're a gymnast. And a modern woman. And younger. You got youth on your side."

"Yeah, you're right," she acquiesced. "What was I thinking? I mean, you being an old, old man with the cane and the walker and the arthritis and the..."

"Alright, that's it," he interrupted. "You're gonna pay and pay big."

He grabbed her around the waist and swung her squealing around in a circle before throwing her headfirst into the truck. She skidded across the seat on her side, holding her broken arm up and out of danger.

"What did I say," he said, slamming the door behind her. "Young and spry."

She just lay on her back on the bench seat and laughed her loud, raucous laugh, all snorts and guffaws.

He smiled a little bit, walking around the front of the truck. He loved the moments of levity they shared. Those brief lapses were a comfort, a souvenir from simpler times when he was the first person she turned to and she was his savior. Back when the world, though dark, was not a pitch black uncertainty. Before her sanity depended upon the perpetual motion of the nomadic.

He thought, swinging himself into the driver's side, that he could go on like this forever--Sal Paradise to her Dean Moriarty. Slamming the door shut, he turned to his passenger. She still lay on the seat, giggling, her head near his thigh. Her dark jeans had a hole in one knee, surrounded by the darker stain of old blood--another reminder of the wreck in Texas.

They had been riding fast on the 20 when a hard rain had kicked up and he had lost control of the chopper. She had trusted him to pull them out of it, refusing to let go of his thick waist even as they skidded across the slick road. For her faith in him, she had road-rash and a broken wrist.

Ditching the bike at a boneyard in Sweetwater, he decided that they'd stick to four-wheeled transportation.

At least until the cast came off.

He turned the key in the ignition; the big block coughed, sputtered and died.

"Not a goddamn word," he warned her.

Looking up at him with wide-eyed faux innocence, she made the universal sign for zipped lips. He tried again and, this time, the engine roared. The clutch groaned when he shifted and the truck lurched forward.

She scooted out of the way of the gearshift as he pulled out onto the vacant, dusty highway. She knelt on the seat and stuck her head and shoulders out of the open window. Her hair whipped around her face as she grinned into the wind. Ducking back into the cab, she patted the dash as though the truck were a good dog. She turned and surveyed the cab.

"Hey, there's a tape still in the deck," she noticed, pointing with one blue-glitter polished finger. He pulled it out and tossed it to her. He threw it a little too hard; it almost went out the window. Her reflexes were fast though and she caught it in time. Sticking her tongue out at him, she turned the tape over in her hand.

"Wow," she said.

"What?"

"_Don McLean's Greatest Hits_." She sounded puzzled. "Shouldn't it be _Greatest Hit_? As in singular? Did he even have more than one hit? Or is it just _American Pie_, over and over? I mean, the rest of these--_Castles in the Air; Superman's Ghost; But She Loves Me; And I Love You_--have you even heard of any of them?"

He had to admit he hadn't.

"See?" she demanded. "Not another hit in the bunch of them. And barf for titles, too." She shook the tape at him. "Alright, I guess we'll just have to try it out."

"How about not," he said.

"Why? I think we should ease the truck into new ownership by playing some familiar music." She grinned and bounced in the seat. "Or maybe this is the truck's favorite music and it breaks down without it. That's the only logical explanation. No living, breathing human being could like Don McLean or his hit or his other non-hits."

"Some people consider _American Pie_ to be a classic, darlin'."

"It's garbage. It's cheese. It's, like, adult contemporary. And it's, like, a billion minutes long, too. It's one of those songs that disc jockeys used to play so they could hit the can." Her voice grew incrementally louder as she ranted. "And people loved it. They cried over it. Over a stupid song! It's totally indicative of the gross sentimentality of a generation of people who couldn't move past the collective trauma of their childhoods. Or something"

"It ain't all bad." He shrugged. "Some great tunes came out of that generation. I should know. I lived through it."

She smiled smugly and pointed at him. "Exactly. That is exactly what I mean. You were there and you're sentimental about it. You're probably one of those crying people. I bet if we listen to it right now, you'll sob like a little, bitty baby."

He glared at her. She grinned toothily.

"So, let's find out. Commence _Operation Sobbing Macho Man_!" Scooting over again, she put the tape in the deck and pressed the rewind button. "It's the first song on the whole tape, 'cause, hello, only hit."

The tape stopped whirring backward and played.

He hadn't heard _American Pie_ in years. Years and years. More years than he liked to admit.

It was a god-awful song.

And it went on and on and on.

Grimacing, he had to admit that it was worse than he remembered. He hated defending something that didn't deserve to be defended. It was when he was about to acknowledge that he had been wrong, that the song really was garbage, that and he heard a tiny, choking sound from beside him.

She was crying.

In front of the tape deck with her sneakers pigeon-toed on the seat and her knees tucked up to her chest, she had rested her right cheek on them. A drop of water dripped off of her nose. She looked very small and even younger than she normally did. Her pigtails were wispy and her bangs clung to her damp forehead.

"Oh, shut up," she sniffled, even though he hadn't said anything. Tears cleared tracks down her dusty, sunburned cheeks.

"So, I was wrong, okay?" He could hear her throat constrict as she choked out the words. "It's just so sad. Everybody dies. Everybody drops dead and dies and there's nothing he can do about except be sad and wish things were different and write a stupid, stupid song."

She turned her head, burying her face in her knees. He could hear her snuffling. He hated seeing her cry. It made him uneasy. Helpless. Made him feel like he had done something wrong that couldn't be fixed. He looked down to where her plaster-enclosed arm lay on the seat. Her fingers were small and pale. They looked shriveled from disuse. Without thinking, he reached across the seat and took them in his large, rough hand. He held them gently in his palm. At the gesture, her head jerked up. Blue eyes wide, she didn't hide her surprise well. For a moment, he thought she'd pull away and steeled himself for the rejection. But, in the end, she surprised him, too, when she just rested her cheek on her knees again. She shut her eyes and left her hand as it was.

He held her hand. He kept his eyes on the road. He gripped the steering wheel. He watched the flat farmland blur as they passed. He looked to the horizon.

He held her broken hand and dreaded the time when he would have to downshift.


End file.
